Situated Cognition

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter explores the situatedness of cognition by comparing three models of human behaviour, underlying Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 bce), Stanley Milgram’s infamous psychological experiments (1960s/1970s), and twenty-first-century cognitive linguistics. Each explanandum is a scenario of conflict between an individual’s moral values and the tasks he or she has agreed to perform. Each author has a different intellectual framework to understand this (situated metacognition). Sophocles explored the sophistic interest in the tension between Neoptolemus’ natural disposition and (rhetorical) argument. Milgram’s desire to understand the Holocaust generated the hypothesis of ‘obedience to authority’. Cognitive linguist Herb Clark reinterpreted the Milgram transcripts in ‘cognitive’ terms and observed the natural human tendency to collaborate gone wrong. The models can be mutually applied, but on disobedience (on display in Milgram’s subjects and Neoptolemus), Sophocles offers more than the others. Thus, the three models are not mutually exclusive, but are shown to have differential situated salience.